Book one of the trilogy

The Weight of Winning

Not what it takes to build a company. What it costs to keep one.

Greg Ciupek

November 2018: an investor offers $1.3 million for 20% of my company.

December 2018: there is $1,000 in the account, and I have seven days to return $53,000.

Between those two sentences there is one whisper at the table. My own manager leans over and says: "We won't last that long." The investor hears it too.

What follows is his private house, his son, a man from security, and a deadline set one week before Christmas. That Christmas Eve I sat at the table with my wife and children. I was not there.

A month later my memory began to go. I could not climb the stairs. I started recording conversations with my own employees, because my head would no longer hold what they said. Nobody noticed.

This is not a book about how to build a company. It is about what it costs to keep one.

• Three months without pay. March 2020, about ten people waiting for their wages. One of them left, then asked to come back. What would you have told her?
• The twenty-first application. Twenty went nowhere. The answer to the twenty-first came within an hour. What was different?
• Twenty people on one Monday. That Sunday I told my wife: "Tomorrow I'm firing people." She said: "You won't do it."
• The man who whispered. What he was really doing behind my back, and how he left the company.
• $200 in 2011. The investment I did not make, and the rule about risk I have kept ever since.

No framework. No seven steps to your first million. Just the bill, itemised, with the numbers left in.

If you are building something of your own, you will reach the minute when talking about courage ends and you actually need it. This book will not tell you that suffering is worth it. It tells you the price is coming, and asks whether you will carry it or run from it. Read it before your December comes.

So did I return $53,000 in seven days?

The full answer is in the last chapter. So is the bill.

It all started at the roadside, with watermelons. I was fourteen.

Book one of a trilogy. Foreword by Jan Paweł Tomaszewski.